Thread: The peril of giving illegal immigrants amnesty

Commentary: The peril of giving illegal immigrants amnesty

Posted: 9:13 PM
Last Updated: 5 hours and 18 minutes ago
By Bonnie Erbe, Scripps Howard News Service

Under the Obama administration's health care reform, Medicaid eligibility is expanded to allow more Americans onto the program. There has been much written about how requiring the uninsured to become insured and covering everyone will cause the federal budget and deficit to balloon over time.

What is less known is the impact on the budget and on taxpayers of granting a path to citizenship or to immigrants in this country illegally. Apparently, it could be huge.

The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonpartisan think tank that supports lower immigration levels and issues papers on the cost of immigration to federal and state budgets. The Center recently issued a paper on what it would cost to provide health care to immigrants now here illegally, if those persons were granted amnesty.

Immigration reform is no longer on the table for this year. Democrats now control Congress and the White House, and many progressives wanted to push immigration reform through before the November elections. While health care reform was tough for Democrats, immigration reform, at least of the type the Obama administration supports, would have been impossible. Many Democrats in swing districts feared that approving a so-called path to citizenship for the 11 million to 12 million or so persons living illegally in the United States would have turned tough re-election bids into missions impossible.

Polling on immigration reform is tough to decipher, but the recession and drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border have bolstered anti-immigrant sentiment. According to USNews.com, recent polls show that 60 percent consider illegal immigration a "very serious problem."

Americans need to be more fully informed about the true costs of granting legal status to millions of immigrants currently here illegally. I will say once more, as I always do when I write about this most touchy of topics, it is not individual immigrants who are the problem. It is mass immigration and our country's ability to absorb and support the millions who enter the U.S. each year both legally and illegally that concerns me.

Just so we're clear on this: Current law bars illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits such as Medicaid (other than for emergency medical care.) But what happens if, as the Democrats would like, they become legal citizens? Congress places a five-year exclusion from most welfare programs on legal immigrants.

Calculating the cost of covering millions of legalized immigrants through Medicaid is a very difficult task. Medicaid is of course a joint federal/state program with benefits varying in some places. And the Center for Immigration Studies also takes into account the fact that not all immigrants here illegally would qualify for Medicaid. Only those with families of four living on $29,000 or less (part of the poverty formula used to qualify low-income Americans for Medicaid) would qualify.

"Nonetheless, we still estimate that covering just 3.1 million uninsured illegal immigrants with the lowest incomes would cost $8.1 billion annually," the CIS report says. "This estimate does not include the extra costs of the illegal immigrants whose incomes would qualify them for the new affordability credits under health reform."

A lot of other things could be done with $8.1 billion each year: job-creation, health care for long-term unemployed Americans, clean energy investment and so on. We should think long and hard before spending it to accommodate persons who begin their lives in the United States by breaking the laws to get and stay here.

--Bonnie Erbe, host of the PBS program "To the Contrary," writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Email her at bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com.

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/local_new ... ts-amnesty

Yup. We keep on importing poverty the longer the border remains unsecured.

They tried to fly that argument that shamnesty would shore up Social Security and learnt that we aren't that stupid so they shut up on that one real quickly I noticed. I don't think we have any business offering citizenship to anyone until we get our house in order. Counting on immigrants to save our economic mess is really criminal I think besides being totally illogical - guaranteed to backfire.